


In Your Own Skin

by Liitohauki



Series: Lost and Loved [4]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Growing Pains, Jötunheimr | Jotunheim, Jötunn Loki, getting bits of skin eaten by eels, raised on Jötunheim, skin shedding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 19:08:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3989389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liitohauki/pseuds/Liitohauki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki hates molting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Your Own Skin

**Author's Note:**

> If you hover the cursor over the Finnish text, an English translation should pop up. And, as always, all translations can also be found in the end notes.

Loki hates molting.

It’s uncomfortable and irritating. The surface of her body feels tight and too small, like she’s been encased in ice all over, and she _itches_. It feels as though there are a thousand, _thousand_ tiny crabs skittering about just beneath her hardened outer layer.

She chafes at her arms, rubs her face into the crook of her elbow, pushes her back against the rough stone wall of the cave.

None of it helps.

She would scowl, if her lips could only bend so far down. Instead, her expression is still and her movements stilted, hampered by skin grown hard and inflexible. She lets out a frustrated whine. 

”What in the name of the Yellers are you doing?” her mother sounds amused. She’s sitting a few feet from her near the flattened boulder she likes to use as a work desk.

Loki wants to go kick her, but her limbs feel too stiff to do so. She settles for growling instead.

Amma can see perfectly well what’s happening. It’s not like _she_ needs to struggle just to move her eye lids. It’s not fair that Loki has to go through this every cycle or two while Mother gets to stay in her skin for more than a decade at a time! 

She mutters as much, but her amma remains cruel and apathetic over the injustice. “Oh, hush. It’s so for all children. Your molt will come less often as you mature,” she says, indifferent and unkind in the face of the suffering of her _only child_ , who might as well just keel over and _die_ for all she seems to care.

Loki decides to do just that. She lets loose a discontented wail and falls to the ground, where she wiggles and writhes in a vain attempt to get the itching to stop while screeching as loud as her lungs will let her, because she’s _dying_ and her mother is _mean_ and deserves no peace. 

There comes a weary sigh, followed by the sound of footsteps.

When Amma is standing above her, Loki makes less noise only so she can focus on biting at her mother’s ankles, since _her_ skin is still soft enough to feel the sting of teeth.

“Stop that,” Mother scolds her as she bends over to pick her up. Loki squirms and hisses and butts at the arms around her with her head like she’s seen the hallaporo do when they’re angry, but Amma’s grip is strong and she won’t let go until Loki stops scratching her and trying to fold back down to the cave floor. 

Amma looks her over with a critical eye, smoothing her hands down Loki’s arms and across her ribs, her back and her sides. Every now and then she squeezes or taps her nails on toughened skin, making faint _ke-ke-ke_ sounds as she does so.

“Alright,” she finally states, “I guess it’s almost time. We should get you to the pool.”

Loki squeals, lifting her arms stiffly above her head. “Kanna! Kanna!” she chants, opening and closing her fists.

Mother tilts her head and snorts. “You can walk fine on your own.” She makes as though to rise from her crouch.

“Eiiii! You have to carry me!” Loki moans and beats at her mother’s legs.

“Oh, I have to?” her amma asks, amused. She obviously doesn’t know _anything_.

“Yes,” Loki states, “because if you don’t I’ll fall over and shatter into twenty three pieces and you’ll need to gather all of them, even the tiny ones, and the shards will be sharp and cut your fingers as you carry them with bleeding palms all the way up to the top of the mountain where you have to plead with the guardian spirit of a secret healing spring to put me back together and it’ll ask you five riddles and if you answer wrong you’ll turn into salt stone!”

Mother blinks down at her. And blinks. And blinks.

“Jaahas,” she finally says, “well, we certainly can’t have that. I’m not climbing a mountain for the likes of you. Up you get!”

Loki settles into the cradle of her mother’s arms, tugging her face against a muscular chest as she’s carried deeper into the mountains.

The sway of her mother’s steps is nearly enough to lull her to sleep, if it weren’t for the itching. “Kutittaa,” she whimpers into her amma's arm pit. 

A large hand envelops the back of her head and tugs on her hair a little - the follicles underneath the hardened layer of skin are as sensitive as ever. Loki pushes into the contact.

“Say, if this healing spring’s so secret there’s a spirit guarding it, how do _you_ know of it?” Amma wonders out loud. 

It’s a silly question. “Because the river told me. _Obviously_.”

She can feel her mother’s chuckle. “It did, did it? And here I thought rivers couldn’t talk.”

Loki scoffs at her ignorance. “Of course it can. The river’s full of drowned lives, it has thousands of voices to choose from.”

Mother stumbles to a halt. A finger nudges beneath Loki's chin, tilting her head so that she’s looking up at her mother’s face.

“Wayfarer have mercy, I can no longer tell when my child is serious,” Amma mutters as her eyes dart about Loki’s features.

Loki tries to bare her teeth but can’t lift her lips high enough, so she decides to bite at the hand holding her chin instead. “’m not lying,” she mumbles into the meat of her mother’s palm. A thumb strokes across her cheek.

“Of course not.” It’s sighed out, resigned and plaintive: _why must you do this to me?_ Mother resumes walking. “Of course the river under our home is possessed, and it speaks to you... I’ve never heard of magic gathering in a moving stream before. I suppose I’ll need to purify all the waters in the lower chambers now I know the river’s _haunted.”_

Loki doesn’t see what the problem is. “Why? The river’s nice. Though you shouldn’t go telling it any secrets, it’s really talkative.”

Her mother’s sigh is loud and long, like a gust of wind crying through a mountain pass. They’re both silent the rest of the way to the pools.

“The shedding pool doesn’t talk to you, does it?”

“No.”

“Good.”

She’s deposited at the shallow end, on a ledge covered in a finger of water. Mother puts her down on her back and sprinkles a handful of fish meal into the pool.

Soon enough, there’s a dark swarm gathering near the platform; a teeming mass of juvenile cleaner eels looking for food. Loki reaches an arm out to coax them closer.

A lone anke, its long ribbon of a body undulating like a wave length, swims near and darts its whiskered head forward to take a nibble out of her extended finger. Its siblings soon follow, rippling their way around Loki’s legs as she sits at the edge of the outcropping.

At first she is numb to the sensation of being eaten, of small teeth nipping off bits and pieces of her dead shell. As more and more new skin is exposed to the questing whiskers of the eels, it starts to tickle; Loki giggles, wiggling her toes and swinging her legs back and forth just to watch the ankes chase after their meal. She chafes at her arms and chest while her mother rubs gently at her hardened scalp until it comes away in one large segment.

It hurts. The roots of her hair go deeper than her old skin, and the sting of the trapped strands getting ripped out along with the shedding layer has her gnashing her teeth. Mother tries to make it better by cooling her hands and stripping her head as carefully and slowly as she can. 

“ _Painu piina päänahasta, häivy haava haivenesta_ ,” she sings while she works, a soft, low tune meant to ease the pain. Loki hums along, tries to focus on the melody and the curious sensation of the eels brushing against her legs rather than the prickling burn of all her hair getting pulled out.

When it’s over, Amma rubs a special ointment on her bald head to help heal the irritated follicles, while Loki picks segments of stiff skin off her face. Her mother’s touch is cool and soothing, and the salve she uses – a special healing balm, invented by a forebear of her mother’s – makes Loki’s scalp tingle pleasantly. 

It would be easier to let all the hair follicles scar shut, like with her eyebrows and eyelashes, but she _likes_ her hair: likes how it’s something shared between her and her mother, likes brushing and braiding and playing with it, and _definitely_ likes how she can use it in so many spells.

“There,” Amma says, giving the top of her skull a pat.

Loki’s head feels barren and too light. She lets out a trill and shoves off the ledge to submerge herself under the clear, clean water, where she opens her eyes to look down at her arms. Her new skin is the bright blue of glaciers and the sea under sunlight. It’s soft and sensitive and makes her feel vulnerable and over-exposed in the shallows. Rough stone digs into the tender soles of her feet as she pushes off to wade deeper into the pool.

She can feel the slightest shift in the water, the press of each and every tiny drop of liquid. The gentle slide of slithering bodies swarming all around her is electrifying. With their feeding frenzy over, the ankes glide alongside her, nipping leisurely at her heels in case they’ve missed a morsel. Loki kicks out whenever one bites too enthusiastically, making their swirling mass scatter and reform. 

She feels tempted to grab one of her opportunistic friends and slice it open so she can shield herself within its slippery hide, but she knows her own skin won’t harden so long as it’s kept untouched by wind or water.

Besides, it would be rude to repay the eels with death for their hospitality.

Loki feels it when her amma dives in with a faint splash; the disturbance ripples across the pool’s surface and makes the droplets against her skin shift and vibrate slightly. She lets out an excited cry when Amma glides into view and shoots away from her mother’s reaching arms, swift as a fish from the closing jaws of a predator, narrowly escaping her grasp. 

They play a long game of Pike and Perch. She evades each attempt at capture until her mother drives her into a corner, at which point Amma bursts from the water, triumphant, Loki held squealing and squirming in her arms. Mother’s grip around her is firm but careful; she is mindful of the vulnerability of new skin as she wades through to the ledge and climbs out of the pool.

Loki is deposited onto a blanket of old hide, worn soft and smooth by use. She wraps it around herself while her mother slips a pair of sandals on her feet and then, when it becomes apparent Loki won’t disentangle herself from the cocoon she’s made from the blanket, lifts her on her feet.

They walk back to their living quarters slowly, Loki leaning on her mother to make sure she doesn’t fall even if she stumbles on the way. And even though she hates how she feels raw and soft and exposed, Loki knows she’s safe.

**Author's Note:**

> Finnish to English:
> 
> "Kanna! Kanna!" = "Carry! Carry!"
> 
> "Eiiii!" = "Nooooo!"
> 
> "Jaahas." = "I see/Huh."
> 
> "Kutittaa." = "Itches."
> 
> After focusing on Unsettled Waters for so long, I felt like doing another random bit of world building on the side. "Anke" is yet another made up animal. As you've probably guessed, it's like an eel, with whiskers reminiscent of a catfish's.


End file.
